


Patrol

by thepurpleswitch (andchimeras)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Backstory, Case Fic, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-09-26
Updated: 2006-09-26
Packaged: 2017-10-09 17:02:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/89673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andchimeras/pseuds/thepurpleswitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It doesn't make sense for a cait sith to be here at all." Growing pains.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Patrol

It is October. They are in Washington, tracking a cait sith. Olallie State Park. Daylight, dusty sunlight shining in hard-edged shafts through cedar branches onto the forest floor.

Their father is up ahead, leading by fifteen feet, then Sam, and Dean is rear guard. They all carry rifles in two hands, across their chests. They step in time, in measured time, almost like a march; slower, not so rigid, up over enormous gnarled tree roots and down past rotting trunks lumped with fungi.

They are looking, into the brush, berry bushes and ferns and shrubs, around massive tree trunks, looking for any sign of it.

The locals reported a rabid cougar, so soaked with sweat it looked black. Three people dead, one a park ranger, the others a pair of hikers in their sixties. The resident conservationist said it is a jaguar, escaped from illegal captivity at a millionaire's home in North Bend.

Their father looked up at Dean in the motel room, the three of them bent over his journal. He tapped a drawing of a muscular black cat with red eyes and a strangely human mouth.

"Demon cat," he said, and Dean nodded.

Sam scowls into the forest, hands sweaty and clenched around his gun. He hates tracking. He remembers being little and enjoying it, because he could hide as well as whatever they were hunting. He remembers taking pride in being able to identify prints and scat and trails, in being so quiet he could duck off their path without Dean noticing. He could come up behind Dean and their father would look back, say, "Where's Sam?" and Dean would start, look around and then Sam would grab him from behind, laughing.

He hasn't done that in a really long time. He stopped doing it when he was still small enough to get away with it, before he was big enough to carry his own gun. He saw the look on Dean's face, worse than the hard concern on his father's--anxious panic.

He realised that Dean never laughed when Sam surprised him like that. Sam doesn't play games when they hunt anymore.

At the next bend in their father's arbitrary path, he stops. He raises his right fist and Sam hears Dean stop behind him, hears himself stop a step later. A step too late. His father looks briefly over his shoulder at him, then scans the woods.

Sam adjusts his grip on his rifle and wishes he could shift his weight. He's got a cramp in his left thigh. Growing pains. He is sixteen and already as tall as Dean. When he first got cramped, Dean would make him lie on the floor wherever they were staying, wherever it was mostly safe, and rub the cramp out. His calves, his shoulders, his arms, his lower back. This time, Sam has been pretending he doesn't hurt at all. He shuts himself up in the bathroom before he goes to bed and tries to get himself loose enough that he doesn't wake up crying, digging his fingers and knuckles into his own muscles. It's not the same.

Mostly, it works. When it doesn't, usually Dean isn't around anyway.

For his last birthday, their father gave Dean several fake IDs that will get him into bars and adult-only pool halls. And because Dean can get in, he goes. He leaves Sam in their room, or with their father when they have to share. Sam frowns when Dean leaves and his father says, "You'll be able to go with him soon, Sammy."

Sam shakes his head.

In the forest, their father gestures forward with his right hand and they start walking again, in step again. Sam listens to the even sound of their footfalls, all at once, as if there is only one man walking in the woods today. Sam's thigh burns and aches. At the back of his throat is a beginning twinge of hunger too. His father starts bearing east again, back towards the road, and Sam is grateful.

Cait sith are generally nocturnal. They might come out at dawn or dusk. They are never out at four in the afternoon. Sam thinks his father might be looking for a trail back to its lair, but this is the wrong place in the park. It's not near enough to the mountains. It's not even near to where the three people were killed.

It doesn't make sense that a cait sith would be here at all. They don't like woods. They especially don't like old growth woods. They like farmlands and the outskirts of small towns. They don't eat adults, they just trick them into leaving their children unattended.

Dean and their father came up with the patrol, decided where to go. Sam wasn't asked. He never is. He runs his finger along the trigger on his rifle.

Before Dean's last birthday, Sam had the last day of his last growth spurt, twisting and needling pain in all his limbs. He curled up on his bed, whining and moaning and mortified. He'd watched Dean have his shoulders and knees pushed back into their sockets with only clenched teeth and leaking tears. He'd watched Dean have skin torn half off his arm and sewn back on. He'd watched Dean wrestle four bullets out of their father's leg.

And there he was, bent up in on himself like a baby, because of growing pains.

Dean came in, he'd been next door with their father, and he swore when he saw Sam. He came to the bed and took Sam by his arms, pulled him down onto the carpet. Dean straightened him out, pressing his shoulders and hips and knees to the floor. Dean told him to stay and didn't ask him why he hadn't said something about how it hurt.

Sam clenched his teeth and tensed up his whole body, trying not to move. Dean started at his shoulders, bearing down on him and pushing his muscles against his bones, grinding his nerves against his bones. Sam strained, trying not to cry out.

Dean said it would be better when he was done, told Sam to try to relax. Sam opened his eyes and looked up at Dean. Sam remembers thinking, he doesn't know--he wouldn't say to relax if he knew.

Felt like his joints were burning under his skin. A natural oil fire, like peppermint or cinnamon, slow and hot, in every cell.

He remembers that he had rug burn on his heels from kicking at the floor, but he doesn't remember doing it.

He remembers how Dean's hands felt like bricks wrapped around him, like warm, rough bricks moving and scraping the cramps away. Millstones, grinding him down into something pliable, something that could be made into something else.

Sam folded his arms under his head when Dean was done with them. He remembers that he was hard when Dean started digging his thumbs into his thighs, but that happened a lot and Dean never said anything. If Sam came out of the shower with a tent in his towel, Dean would joke. When Sam woke up with a dark damp spot on his sheet, Dean would joke. When Sam was hurt or hurting, Dean never joked.

Dean nudged his knees up and worked the knuckles of his fists into Sam's left hamstring, then the right. He used his fingers to pry apart the muscles in Sam's calves. He held on to Sam's knees when he was done. Sam shook and panted, then found himself still and quiet.

Sam met Dean's eyes and nodded and said thank you. Dean shrugged and braced a hand on the bed to help himself up.

Light came through the white curtain of the room with a hard edge, made the spaces between the furniture and the walls seem carved in relief, gave a cut contrast to the erection in Dean's jeans. Sam jerked with recognition, swallowed and looked away. He lowered his arms, crossed them over his chest. Dean didn't move.

Sam felt the lowness in his belly, the nearness and fullness of whatever it was made him like this too. There was a line of light under the door of their room. Sam looked back to Dean, was sliding his right hand out from under his left arm, was going to reach up.

Dean was already moving, turning his back to Sam and opening the door. The air outside was cold but sharp with spring. Dean came back and held out a hand to Sam. He wasn't hard anymore. Sam felt a cramp start to coil again, in his chest, between his lungs. He took Dean's hand and let himself be pulled up.

He got under the covers on his bed and listened to Dean moving around, packing and moving things, taking out a gun to clean. The door stayed open. Sam kept his eyes closed and pretended to sleep all afternoon.

A mile from the car, Sam hears a twig snap at his right. He drops and pulls his rifle around and sees the shadow as he hears the shot. He loses balance and falls on his butt when the body hits the ground. His rifle is still in his hands.

Buckshot soaked in whiskey, mixed with gravel. Sam can smell the alcohol as the cait sith twitches, burning from the inside. Smoke trails from the bloody mess of its belly.

Dean breathes hard a few feet away and their father stops running a few feet further back.

"Good shot, Dean," he says.

Sam looks up at Dean, panting too. Adrenaline like cough medicine on his tongue. "Thanks," he says.

Dean reaches down and grabs Sam's wrist, hauls him up. "Saved your scrawny ass again," he says, and grins.

He walks to their father and they turn away, headed to the car at a faster pace. Sam hears words for salting and burning the cait sith's carcass. He looks at it, the oddly gaunt shape of it in a pool of its own blood.

He reaches down and digs his thumb into his aching thigh.

 

End.


End file.
